


Love Marriage

by reafterthought



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, Introspection, ffn challenge: diversity challenge, word count: 501-1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:55:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21718015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reafterthought/pseuds/reafterthought
Summary: Katniss isn't sure she knows that kind of love Gale and Peeta wax poetry about.
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Gale Hawthorne, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Kudos: 14
Collections: The DFC Challenge Collection





	Love Marriage

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Diversity Writing CHallenge, b33 - write about a pairing that is not your OTP

Gale is wrong, she thinks.

Actually, Gale contradicts himself so he's wrong either way, but that isn't what she means. She isn't incapable of love, and she doesn't love Peeta. Or, rather, she doesn't love him in the way the rest of the world thinks.

(Except Haymitch, maybe, because Haymitch pushed most of their sordid love affair through the media and always seemed to understand a little bit more about her and him and the Capitol than she'd ever grasped).

She's just trying to save as many people as possible and there's an established hierarchy that puts herself, and then her family and friends above all else, and her district above others. And isn't that normal? To want to live? To want your loved ones to live? To not be a self-sacrificing fool whose suicidality can't save anyone?

Except Peeta does save her with that, multiple times, and isn't she the one who runs to him on the riverbank as soon as there's a glimmer of hope?

But isn't it also her who leaves him to the tracker jackers, who is ready to kill him when the opportunity presents himself because she'd promised her sister she'd come home?

Who's the altruistic one, in the end? Who's the selfish one? She's selfish, she knows, because she's played through the whole romance with Peeta only because she was protecting herself, and then her family.

But she was a little bit relieved when she learnt she didn't have to kill Peeta after all. She was a little bit relieved when Peeta backed off early in their campaign, when he confessed his love for her on the grand stage (and yes, she threw him against the wall, but that was pride stung by perceived pity). She was a little relieved that he would die for her. She was a little bit relieved that, despite all of that, Peeta isn't afraid to stare her down, to fight back if he thinks she's wrong, and he isn't afraid to go behind her back for what he believes is the best for her.

But she won't do the same for him. She can't do the same for him because she loves Prim and, despite her faults and her failures, she loves her mother as well. Peeta, she thinks, can't love her mother enough if he's willing to die for another girl… Or maybe that is what romantic love is, to be willing to sacrifice everything for the cause.

And that's why she knows she doesn't love Peeta, not in the same way he loves her. It's a one-way street; she can lean on him as heavily as she needs to (despite her pride, and where along the way has she dropped her pride?) but what is she giving him in return? Gale and her, they'd had a more equal relationship and maybe he was right that she'd mistaken that for a possibility of love, but he was wrong in that it automatically meant she loved someone else.

She realises and appreciates that she would have been dead several times over if not for him and vice versa (though she doubts either of them have been keeping a proper tally), but the same goes for Haymitch and Rue and their allies in the Quarter Quelled.

But after everything, she doesn't think she can love anyone that way, and Peeta is the next closest thing.


End file.
